A hill that stands alone above the Salem plain.
An isolated block of hills rising abruptly off the Salem plain, planted with coffee since the 1820s and largely ignored by the specialty trade ever since. Cooler and drier than the Malnad, with a cup cleaner than most people expect from Tamil Nadu.
Shevaroy Hills · Salem · Tamil Nadu
It is October, and the cherry is ripening on the branch. Picking starts in December.
March showers set the blossom in a short window. Picking runs roughly December to February.
The Shevaroy Hills sit in Salem district, a compact Eastern Ghats massif that lifts abruptly off the surrounding plain and flattens into a plateau — Yercaud town at 1,515 m, the Servarayan temple at 1,628 m the highest point. Estates occupy roughly 1,000–1,500 m, robusta on the lower, warmer margins.
A sharply defined dry season, compared to the wet Malnad taluks of Chikmagalur, gives a defined blossom — March showers set flowering across the region in a short window, which means more uniform ripening and makes selective hand-picking genuinely practical. Picking runs roughly December through February. Yercaud has no GI tag of its own — the 2019 round covered Coorg, Wayanad, Chikmagalur, Araku and Bababudangiris, not Tamil Nadu — so Yercaud coffee is sold on estate name rather than a regional mark.
Nothing from this farm on the shelf this week. The relationship outlasts any one harvest.
“Yercaud is proof that Tamil Nadu grows serious arabica, not just the fine robusta the state is better known for. Gemblary is our one relationship here and we'd take a second in a heartbeat if the right estate came along.”
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